This month we have been told to have a little “fun.” But since I usually write about law related web links, which by nature are not particularly “fun,” I thought about what I considered a good way to spend my summer, and back to a vacation I took.

A few years ago I took an Alaskan Inside Passage cruise, the best vacation I have ever had! Part of the reason it was so great was that instead of taking one of the big cruise ships, my spouse and I took our cruise on a boat that held 49 passengers. It was the MV Executive Explorer, a high-speed catamaran, of the Glacier Bay Cruise Lines. Because it was both a small boat and a catamaran, it could venture into the narrowest fjords and get so close to the glaciers we were viewing, that a calving piece could easily have hit the boat. At the time I took the cruise I did not think about these safety issues or any other admiralty laws or regulations. I just enjoyed myself.

But since I spend my work life as a law librarian I am forced to occasionally consider these issues. So this month I am going to highlight a few places on the Internet that you might want to bookmark for the next time you have a question about admiralty law.

The first one is a site that many list as the best. “The Admiralty and Maritime Law Guide includes over 1,500 annotated links to admiralty law resources on the Internet and a growing database of admiralty case digests, opinions and international maritime conventions. The emphasis is on the law of the United States and the focus is on Internet resources that can be used in an effective and practical manner by admiralty attorneys and maritime professionals.” This site was created by Todd Kenyon, an admiralty attorney and member of a New Jersey Law firm. You can find it at: http://www.admiraltylawguide.com/lawguides.html.  This site really does appear to link to most resources that you may want or need to use. The only quibble I have with the site is that I could not determine how often it is updated, as there is no date beyond the copyright date – and that is from 2006. So, has it been updated since then? I finally looked at the Circuit and Supreme Court cases it annotated and found that these had not been updated beyond 2005. But the web links I followed from the site still worked, so that is a big plus. The sheer numbers of links are impressive! So, I would still start there, even though it appears that Mr. Kenyon is no longer updating the web site.

One link his site included that particularly peaked my interest was the Cruise Lines International Association at http://www.cruising.org/.  This site includes the Cruise Industry Policies and Resources at http://www.cruising.org/industry/tech-intro.cfm and contains a copy of agreed to Safety Standards plus links to international organizations  and federal agencies that regulate the industry. A Safety Standard it includes, the Cruise Ship Helicopter Pick up Area Standard, stopped me for a moment. Did it mean that my 49 passenger boat needed to include a helipad? No, it did not. It is meant to deal with situations when cruise ships are beyond 20 miles from the shoreline and must evacuate passengers or handle medical emergencies. My boat never got that far from shore.

You may wonder why I keep saying boat when I am referring to the cruise ship I took. That is what the captain and crew called it. They explained that you never call it a ship, it is a boat. The size wasn’t the determining factor, it was that this boat traveled the inland waters, and any ship that did so was called a boat.

With that aside let’s return to a few more admiralty law resources. Visit Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, as it is one of the best places to look at Maritime and Admiralty Law. This web site is one that should always be one of your favorites, if it isn’t already. Find its admiralty law resources at:http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/index.php/Admiralty. Of course, it contains the United States Code, plus court decisions, international treaties, government agencies, and even includes links to a weblog and an admiralty, boating and maritime podcast. This site is definitely keeping up.

One of the federal agencies it links to is the Federal Maritime Commission, an “independent regulatory agency responsible for the regulation of ocean borne transportation in the foreign commerce” of the U.S., at   http://www.fmc.gov/. This government web site includes information on filing a complaint about that cruise you took. I certainly did not have a complaint about my cruise. The web site also includes a truly unique “deep web” resource, a database called the Online Agreement Library at http://www3.fmc.gov/btaagmnts/. Search by carrier – for instance Princess Cruise Lines, or Norwegian, or Carnival and find copies of the effective carrier agreements, including recent and proposed amendments and then look at them in pdf format.

The Maritime Law Association of the United States at http://www.mlaus.org/ contains an interesting set of web links organized by headings such as Arbitration Resources, Colleges, Courts, Legal Resources, and Other Maritime Law Associations. It includes many international sources. Among these is a link to the Commercial Crime Services (CCS) of the International Chamber of Commerce. This is a membership organization tasked with combating all forms of commercial crime.  It includes the Piracy Reporting Centre, which “maintains a round-the-clock watch on the world’s shipping lanes, reporting pirate attacks to local law enforcement and issuing warnings about piracy hotspots to shipping.” This got my attention as I remembered the attack on the Seabourn Spirit, which was off the coast of Somalia when pirates fired rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns as they tried to board the ship. No one tried that with the boat I was on, my cruise was just fine.

Lastly, I remembered to check the University of Washington Gallagher Law Library, and indeed it has an admiralty law guide, prepared just this year for one of the law school courses. It includes many of the above resources, plus a good list of secondary source materials owned by the Library. You can find it at: http://lib.law.washington.edu/ref/maritime.html#web.

The first link I checked was to the Glossary of Maritime Law Terms (2d ed. 2004), updated regularly by Professor William Tetley at McGill Law School. I visited the web site and noticed that Professor Tetley included links to his Curriculum Vitae, plus links to something titled Antic Anecdotes. I couldn’t resist, I checked them out. This particular maritime and admiralty law professor has a sense of humor. And to think that his original goal was to become a tax attorney!!

Have some “fun” this month and check out the admiralty law links I mentioned. If you need more help, please feel free to call the Library at 206-296-0940, or visit our web site at: www.kcll.org and leave us a question.